Organizations often use enterprise computing systems to facilitate business processes and manage organizational data. Larger organizations may have vast amounts of data relating to products offered for sale by the organization, customers purchasing the products, employees of the organization, sales orders of the products, production plans, and so on. For example, a larger organization may have thousands of products for sale, thousands of different customers purchasing the products, and thousand of employees.
Different computing processes may require a user to identify one or more of these records in a particular transaction. For example, when completing a sales order form, a user may be asked to identify a particular product being ordered. To identify products being ordered, in first instances, the user may directly enter a product identifier if the identifier is known by the user. In second instances, the product may be preselected depending on the context in which the sales order form was created. For example, if the sales order form was triggered in response to a prior query of a particular product, then the queried product may be preselected as the product being ordered.
In third instances a product may be selected from a drop-down list box populated with products selected in the past. Finally, in fourth instances, queries may be run to select products to be added. The usefulness of the each of these instances may be limited when a user wants to add multiple record values to a table, such as multiple products to a sales order.
The first instances, in which the user directly enters a record identifier, may be cumbersome and impractical for entering multiple records, especially if some of the record identifiers are unknown. The second instances, in which the product is preselected, may be impractical for the selection of multiple records and also if the records to be selected were not preselected. The third instances may also be impractical if the records to be selected were not selected in the past and included in the drop-down list box. The fourth instances of running queries to identify products may be impractical if the queries return a large result set requiring time consuming manual screening by the user for a record to be selected or if multiple queries must be executed to select different records.
There is thus a need for a simplified multiple record selection interface that can be easily integrated into different existing record selection interfaces of enterprise computing systems.